Performance as Protest: Exhibition Tour with Elizabeth Diggon

Tour

Join Esker’s assistant curator Elizabeth Diggon on this conversational tour that considers the significance of performance and performative gestures to the work of Jeffrey Gibson and Nep Sidhu, and the potential for performance to challenge dominant narratives, address difficult histories, and foster community.

Registration recommended, free, all welcome

October 25th, 2019 at 7-8pm

Related Exhibitions

September 28 - December 20, 2019

curated by cheyanne turions
Opening reception: Friday 27 September, 6-10pm
'Divine of Form, Formed in the Divine (Medicine for a Nightmare)' examines how memories persist in the present, especially when related to personal and collective practices of resistance, resilience, and ritual. This mid-career survey is anchored by recent works that reflect upon Sikh histories amongst other collectively formed and formative histories considered through collaborations with Maikoiyo Alley-Barnes and Nicholas Galanin. Across different bodies of work produced over the last decade, Sidhu explores how memorialization practices can transfigure grief and loss, and how they can speak to the power and harmony of the divine.
Anchoring the exhibition are works from Sidhu’s 'When My Drums Come Knocking They Watch' series. These large-scale tapestries variously commemorate how percussive rhythms are formed through labour, function as the architecture of ceremony, structure communication, and collectively evoke how cultural practices conjure aural and embodied rhythms that carry ancestral connections forward in time.

September 28 - December 20, 2019

Opening reception: Friday 27 September, 6–10pm
'Time Carriers' conjures a vision of many hands providing a framework of support, a fluid utopia where trust and movement go hand in hand. It evokes a time frame that both unites and collapses present, past, and future into an undulating and responsive single unit, something that could best be described as community or family. This idea seems especially appropriate when considering Jeffrey Gibson’s work, as it has always pushed to create kinship among unlikely partners.
Gibson’s artwork intermingles elements of traditional Native American art, art historical references, craft, and pop culture. A wide range of both historic and contemporary Native American symbols and objects including powwow regalia, 19th century parfleche containers, and drums are seamlessly merged with elements from Modernist geometric abstraction, Minimalism, the pattern and decoration of traditional textile practices, as well as techno, rave, and club culture.